Care Skillsbase

Manage skills

Step-by-step guidance on how to take constructive action on communication and number skills

• Meet your organisation's needs (8 Skills Checks)Open

  Raise awareness - Four handouts to help you raise awareness in your care organisation about the importance of communicating and dealing with information effectively.

  Create a learning environment - Research suggests that some environments are more conducive to learning than others. This guidance helps you to ensure the climate in your care organisation is favourable to learning.

  Audit your organisation’s approach - Review how your care organisation deals with communication and number skills at the moment.

  Analyse your organisation’s needs - Follows on from the audit: identify areas for immediate improvement.

  Should you be taking a more systematic approach? - Decide if your care organisation could benefit by taking a more systematic approach to communication and number skills.

  Specify skills by job role - Help staff understand what communication and number skills jobs in care require and how they are expected to apply them.

  Specify skills by task - Help staff understand what skills care tasks require by creating specifications that include using information and communicating.

  Use quality management tools to solve problems - Information and communication problems may not always be about skills. Workplace systems, simple one-off errors, personalities and difficulties outside work may all be involved. Some useful tools are available to help you analyse and solve problems collaboratively with staff.

• Work with individuals (8 Skills Checks)Open

  Channels of communication - An overview of the channels available to alert staff to the importance of communicating and dealing with information effectively.

  How to tell staff what you want them to do - It is important that staff know exactly how you want them to communicate and deal with information. These guidelines will help you achieve this.

  Talk constructively about skills gaps - Talking to someone about a communication and number skills gap can be awkward. This guidance helps you handle it in a way that strengthens the employment relationship.

  Manage the risk posed by staff with limited skills - Where safety and quality depend on staff communicating and dealing with information effectively, staff with limited skills may pose a risk. Use this guidance to help you assess and manage that risk.

  Help staff develop their skills - Help staff develop improve their ability to communicate and deal with communication on-the-job through work activity, and off-the-job through classroom training.

  Select a learning provider - What to consider when selecting or commissioning a specialist provider of communication and number skills training.

  Using a Care Skillsbase Skills check for training - How to use Skills check for workplace training with individuals or groups.

  Follow up a Care Skillsbase Skills check - What to do after the Skills check, including how to identify any risk posed by limited skills, monitor work performance and respond quickly to problems.